


The Healer

by Soloh



Category: Outlander & Related Fandoms, Outlander (TV), Outlander Series - Diana Gabaldon
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-30
Updated: 2018-09-30
Packaged: 2019-07-20 21:21:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,617
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16145768
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Soloh/pseuds/Soloh
Summary: Jamie seeks help from the shop of curiosities to rid him of his pained heart.





	The Healer

To those odd fellows who are not shackled by all-consuming desires, their hearts never ripped apart to fester hopelessly from that gaping rotting wound, days passed by unremarkable in their small quiet lives.

 

Never were they beckoned to a strange old apothecary’s shop disguised from their untroubled eyes as nothing more than an abandoned building - fraught with weeds, rampant with decay. Only the weary-hearted in need of the impossible to heal their sorrows could see and beg a wish of the guardian. A healer with a supernatural gifts only as great as her spirits eternal light.

 

However, a wish for her skills always came at a price. An exchange of equal value of something precious to the desperate soul.

 

Nothing more, nothing less.

 

And today she had a visitor who paced and paced outside her gates of slate, his bleary eyes disturbed as a mourning sea.

 

 

_____

 

Past the facade that shrouded all from prying eyes, was a surrounding, endless garden thriving wild as a forest, where all that grew reached up, up to soak in the golden rays of the cloudless spring sun. Even the young apprentice Elias Pound, kneeled with a spade gripped to the verdant earth, found himself high in spirits despite his nose twitching as a hare’s from inquisitive dragonflies on the breeze.

 

He kindly swatted away at their shimmery beating wings, back to his task of rooting for the treasures burrowed deep with the earthworms, when his hand came dangerously close to a patch of prickly violet plants that stirred in anticipation for his blunder to be their gain. Before he could move another inch closer the lad felt a touch, delicate and familiar, at his shoulder.

 

The mistress of light.

 

Simply clad in a thin white button-down rolled up her slender forearms and tucked into her well-loved trousers, stitched here and there from age. Further down she wore a pair of shoes that had never known a day without a stroll through the grass, while her hair was an entity unto itself, curling warm as a halo about her face.

 

“Careful with those,“ Claire cautioned with a gentle squeeze, crouching down to join him in the dirt that was her second skin. The life sprouting high and lively, her fervent love. "The juice from a split stalk will slowly eat away at your skin, baring the white of your bones.”

 

Withdrawing his hand to the spattered muck of his lap, Elias scrutinized, not in wariness, but in furrowed brow curiosity at the danger that smelled of citrus, tangy and crisp. "Why grow such a wretched plant at all then?”

 

“Because too many folk in the early days of wine and mead knew its leaves held a cure for a bruising hangover and squandered it, leaving the earth barren of its name and very nearly its seed except for here in this patch of earth.” She fondly thumbed the fuzzy underside of one sharp-edged leaf that had saved her from many a dark and pleasurable bender.

 

“They also keep the vermin away but sadly not the untrained eye.” Claire gave the lad a pointed, yet not unkind look of reprimand. “Keep to your studies, Elias, if you value your fingers.”

 

“I shall, mistress,” the young lad assured, with his round freckled cheeks pinking abashedly under a mop of russet hair. The color deepened as he sputtered a chuckle when she thumped him, shoulder to shoulder, at the title he addressed her by.

 

As he forever would do no matter the years, decades. A century or two.

 

When Claire kept herself perched beside him, taking inventory of his frayed basket filled with wild garlic, sprigs of mint and a bitty red ladybug roving lost atop them, Elias wondered aloud, “Wasn’t _Mr. Fraser_ supposed to call on you today?”

 

He was a friendship of hers that had kindled months before and was never one to keep the mistress of the house waiting.

 

Before she could answer where Elias would hear the disquiet in her voice, note the concern in her eyes, a bell clear as birdsong echoed through the air, signaling the company in question had arrived.

 

Claire rose from the tuft grass as if she’d been plucked by the breeze and quirked a brow at her apprentice, a faint smile at her mouth. “Do keep yourself in one piece, _Mr. Pound_. It’d be a shame to lose a fine hand such as yours.”

 

He gave her a cheek grin, rubbing his nose with a sooted knuckle that painted him more speckled than he already was. “Don’t bother a worry with me, mistress. And send my regards to your man for me.”

 

Claire ignored the last comment, if it was even heard, as she was already off towards the fading bell chime.

 

____

 

Claire hurried down the hallway of her inheritance from long ago, the power chanted to the walls having given her years beyond the promise of a creator high above. Where rooms were neatly cluttered with every curiosity that caught her eye, itched at her hands, had the power to heal the human soul.

 

There were shelves enclosed with folding glass doors, twice the height of a man extending from floor to mahogany beamed ceilings. They held bottles of bitter thick liquids that could coat a mouth a frothy bluish-green, others sweet as fruit just tumbled from a vine, fallen from a tree.

 

Cabinets of charms big as fists, smaller than thimbles, to ward against dark spirits that lurked in the shadows, stalking the unknowing until their touch was upon them, claiming flesh and mind. Mirrors were scattered among the bric-a-brac of another that gleamed reflections of other realms, and time, but draped with sheets to shield any unfortunate from falling through, leaving nothing but a wisping breath of who they once were behind.

 

And one room left undisturbed held tear-stained belongings that were sacrificed to purge a spirit of its relentless suffering.

 

As would be done today.

 

Claire slowed her stride to gather breath to lungs, brushing from her cheeks a tickling of errant curls puffing like that of a marigold, having been cut above her proud shoulders during an impulsive battle of struggle and defeat where she broke several brushes to a shamble of splinters.

 

Jamie had been the one she chose to face before the condemnation outside her doorsteps. He had fondly tugged the springy dark locks, promising they were lovely still.

 

“As a tangled bushel of curly dock weeds,” he said provokingly with a snort. Claire had flicked his nose in glaring retaliation (even as she was mildly impressed he recalled any of her chatter on the botanical), then readied her elbow for a jabbing as his wide mouth pursed for another compliment that divulged into rib-shaking laughter.

 

However, that joyful tease in his lilting voice had been smothered to a haunted rasp when he called upon her at the solemn hour of dawn’s first light.

 

“I beg for yer hand to heal me, _Claire_. To bleed my misery, gift me peace.”

 

Unspoken was the why and reason when questioned from her tightened throat. The call falling dead when uttered that she would do all that was possible for him.

 

And that Claire vowed to do as she turned a final corner to the front of her home that doubled as her shop, finding Jamie faced away from her, edged over the long oak countertop. He was rigid as stone from shoulder to toe, except for his fingers rapping frantic as a raving heartbeat against the hardwood until he heard his name whispered, breaking his anxious trance to glance her way.

 

His eyes, skimmed with shadows, were a fleeting rush of mingled relief and fear, with a flicker of intensity undefinable. Then gone behind a mask of stillness cracking at the seams as he averted his gaze to the empty space between them.

 

Claire felt the whole of her seize to see Jamie sickened with such an affliction and a chest gnawing guilt that she a healer, hadn’t seen the signs of distress before now.

 

That he didn’t trust her with his woe before it came to this.

 

At her approach, she raised a palm to touch him - whether it be his hand soothed between hers or to clutch her dearest friend with all she had until his ill had seeped to her - only to let it falter to her chest as the very motion caused Jamie to clench his jaw in a flinch.

 

Another crack breaching his mask.

 

He bowed his head in apology, waves lusterless as rust and Claire’s own features gentled in response, wanting to act unfazed.

 

“You’re late. Not having second thoughts are you?”

 

“No.” Was Jamie’s curt reply, raspy still. “If ye please, I would like to be rid of this,” he tapped a long forefinger to his temple. “Now and forever.”

 

Claire inclined her head, resisting the urge to thread her arm with his. A habit from their first stumbling meeting, a ritual now rebuked. “Of course, come with me.”

 

She led Jamie to what was amusedly called her enchanters den, as it illuminated serenely in warmth not entirely from the window, and where the fragrance of herbs and budding flowers floated from the rafters were they hung. But as Claire held the door open to Jamie’s heavy dragging step he lingered at the doorway.

 

“Is the lad wi’ ye today?”

 

Claire assured him they would have no interruptions as Elias was in the garden. “Probably singeing his poor fingers as we speak and rueing the day he ever crossed across my path.”

 

She hoped to spark a chuckle, no matter how dim to lessen his gloom, but Jamie merely strode past her (mouth pressed into a numbing white line, ducking low to avoid a smack from the doorframe), sitting at the small round table in the middle of the den. In the past the two had tea there, possibly spiked with a heavy hand of brandy, telling each other’s fortunes of fantastic demise and toothless hunchbacked lovers from grubby leaf bottoms and the crumbled bits of chocolate biscuits.

 

All that dressed it now were brown bits of petaled blooms.

 

Taking her seat across Jamie (his attention absorbed in the wood grain), and needing to dispel the disturbance clinging to him, Claire began her speech recited thousands of times before to those like he.

 

And once spoken to her when she sat in his very seat.

 

“Your thoughts are yours alone. The images, good and bad, are protected from my sight, but I can feel them, all that plagues you. You only need to free your mind to be healed.”

 

The words sinking in, Jamie flicked his dour gaze uneasily to hers.

 

“I have yer word I willna remember all that ails me, _Sassenach_?” The name he gave her that strung across her like a harp that flared her eyes of purest amber.

 

“I promise. Even if I must rip its possession of you.”

 

So with a heavy exhale, Jamie pulled from his breast pocket a small cherrywood snake, staring wistfully into its knobby gaze, and rubbed his thumbs against the ridges carved down its coiled spine. Underbreath he said something haltingly in gaelic (Claire thought it meant goodbye) then laid the snake carefully between them.

 

"To honor the mistress of the house.”

 

Claire wished she could refuse him but she was bound to the rules of give and take. All she could do was give it the same reverence as Jamie, holding it where a stroke from head to tail flashed with a childhood spent frolicking in highland glades prickled with pine and heather, shivering to the bone in unforseen rain.

 

And of a brothers love that brightly shined as her fingers slid across the flat belly scratched with the name, _Sawny_.

 

Claire gently placed it aside and held her palms up, where streaks of green, scented strongly of mint, lightly marked a few of her fingertips. "I’ll need to touch you now. It’s the only way for me to do what must be done. ”

 

Color finally flushing his pallid skin, Jamie breathed almost shyly, “Ye may. It wouldna be proper if I were to go wi'out smelling like yer wee herbs."

 

They shared a smile, however small, as Jamie’s was much too weak.

 

Without thought, needing to be near him, Claire pushed her chair closer to his (not missing the sharp inhale from the man next to her) and tentatively cradled his face where she couldn’t help but stroke against the scarring lines of restlessness. Beneath his blueless eyes under long lashes, down to the stubbled thin cheeks stretched tightly over sharp curving bone, and then the corner of his wide mouth that twitched, parting softly in a gasp.

 

Jamie was quick to brace her wrists.

 

"There’s nothing to fear, Jamie” Claire soothed, her breath of honey, tang of whisky, kissing at his lips. “Trust in me to care for you.”

 

He managed to muster a half smile, crooked and true, but his gaze of her was mournful. Regretful even. “I always do, _Sassenach_. Always.”

 

But he kept his grip on her that whitened his knuckles and she refused to let him see the worry creeping up her back as she pressed her fingers to his temples.

 

“Now, focus on the pain.”

 

Jamie’s eyes fluttered closed and Claire delved into his mind with a touch that glowed just as the flowers of devotion, a radiant blue.

 

She was enveloped with the pieces of him that blared like the sun - That bull-headed stubbornness, his insufferable sense of humor, vexing her even as she bubbled over with laughter. And Jamie’s pure hearted goodness, so forgiving and impossibly kind that she admired so.

 

But underneath that beautiful light, Claire felt an agonizing blood red pain slashing apart his flesh, crying out in despair that misted her eyes as her hand fell, clasping the source of it all.

 

A burning heart so divine in love.

 

“Oh, Jamie.”

 

His eyes flew open in gut clenching panic. “You said ye couldna see.”

 

“I can’t. I only feel what consumes you and I do as if it were my own heartbeat throbbing, shattering.” Her blood was indeed rising with his dizzying passion, hunger and such unspeakable love rippling like wildfire.

 

“How can this person not reciprocate?” Her voice cracked.

 

Jamie lowered his chin and covered both his broad palms over hers until the fragile bones quivered from the mounting pressure, pressing them against his hammering heart, slowly killing him.

 

"She kens nothing of how I feel, nor could she ever bless me with what I yearn to have. She haunts my every dream to where I fear to sleep. I canna breathe when I see her, am near her - even if I only think of her my heart’s blood leaves me as if to perish.”

 

Mouth twisting in pain he whimpered, “Now please free my soul of her. ”

 

Claire dug her nails through his shirt, swallowing the salty sting of tears.

 

“You will feel a coldness towards this woman. No love or warmth will she ever be to you. You’ll remember her but she will hold the same place as a stranger in your heart. Can you handle that?”

 

“That’s what I want. What I need.” Tears freely trickled down his wasted face and Claire knew that no words would sway him. Pressing her forehead to his, she sought once more to grasp that wild flame he wanted to smother.

 

“Say her name aloud.”

 

Jamie’s pressed his trembling thumbs to the jumping pulse at her wrists, breathing once, then other and once more again, he sobbed.

 

_“Sorcha.”_

 

“A pretty name who will be no more to you.”


End file.
